In the early 1970s a receptionist called Sharon Atkins gazed into the future and hoped it would contain fewer people like her. “We’re going to have to find machines which can do that sort of thing,” she told the social historian Studs Terkel. “You’re wasting an awful lot of human power.” She felt shackled to the incessantly ringing phone. In snatches of time between calls, she wrote rambling letters, never posted, about how depressed she was. Her job was so routine she felt as she had been turned into “just a little machine”. “It’s really unfair to ask someone to do that.”
上世紀70年代初，一位名叫莎倫•阿特金斯(Sharon Atkins)的前臺在憧憬未來時希望，將來像她一樣人的會減少。「未來我們一定得造出能做這些工作的機器，」她對社會歷史學家斯塔茲•特克爾(Studs Terkel)說，「這是對人力資源的極大浪費。」她感覺自己被響個不停的電話給綁架了。在接聽電話的短暫間隙，她會寫一些內容不著邊際的長信，抒發她內心的壓抑。不過，這些信件從未寄出過。她的工作都是些重複性瑣事，她感覺自己已變成了「一臺小小的機器」。「讓人來做這樣的工作真的很不公平。」